Prisma Film

A strange family: 17-year-old Phil lives with his mother and twin sister in an old mansion on the outskirts of town. When he returns from summer camp, the mood in the mansion has soured somehow. Phil doesn’t worry about it, hanging out with his best friend Kat instead. When he starts to feel attracted to a mysterious new student at school, Phil is plunged into emotional turmoil only exacerbated by the trouble at home.

The film focuses on the Leopoldstadt district of Vienna. The picture it paints is one which could apply to other parts of Vienna and other European cities, an insight into daily reality revealing how little people know about each other and how thoughtlessly they expect strangers to behave according to their values. We hear the views of Austrians and immigrants, Yugoslavians and Turks who have lived here for twenty years. Their conversations reveal hatred of foreigners and children and prejudices not limited to a social class at all.

"The Treasure Hunter" is a portrait of writer, publisher and book collector Hermann Gail, who in his youth gave up on life as the result of a terrible sin. He was saved through an unconditional devotion to art.

Alex, an ex-con working as muscle in a Vienna brothel, dreams of escaping with his girlfriend Tamara, who also works there. Their attempt to break free sets off a chain of events that links their fate with a rural police officer and his troubled marriage. As their lives intersect, a quiet struggle unfolds between guilt, grief, and the desire for redemption.

A film about jailed refugees waiting for deportation and the many conflicts which affect their personal fates, the efforts of refugee organizations and the problems of the affected authorities.

A flare shoots through the night. "Red brothers" against right-wing extremists; immigrant groups against right-wing "louts"; knives and tear-gas against baseball bats. "WADADENG, WADADENG, listen to my 9 mm go BANG" ... Rap and hip-hop in Vienna.

The Loiblpass is situated in the mountains between Austria and Yugoslavia: 12km from the village of Neumarktl and 10km from Ferlach in Carinthia. Between 1943 and 1945, political prisoners from the Mauthausen concentration camp drove a tunnel into the mountains at an altitude of 1200m. To this day, two people have been linked by this tunnel: Janko Tisler was an engineer in charge of the building site in 1944; today he lives in Krize, south of the tunnel. Dr. Sigbert Ramsauer, the SS doctor of the camp at the site then, at the age of 80 still practises in Klagenfurt. Janko Tisler fights against forgetting, Dr. Ramsauer wishes he were forgotten. The history of the tunnel has become theirs as well.

Martha is a single woman who lives for one passion: cooking. The head chef at a chic restaurant, Martha has no time for anything - or anyone - else. But Martha's solitary life is shaken when a fateful accident brings her sister's eight-year-old daughter, Lina, to her doorstep.

Sebastian and Paul are two bored boys about 16 years of age. They drink alcohol, steal - and attend a private school. They can't find a sense of meaning in their present adolescent existence. They abduct Sonja and lock her in an old, abandoned factory building. But what shall they do with her? Disorientation, fear, desire and also love are changing into cruel aggression.

Two men and one woman are involved in a dramatic triangle between love and passion, transgression and betrayal. Florian Flicker has set Karl Schönherr's "Der Weibsteufel" in Austria's borderland shortly after the turn of the last century. In the remote swamps next to the March River, Hans and Jana are living in a criminal idyll that comes tumbling down when a young soldier enters the picture.

Garbage men. Garbage women. They swarm out daily to eliminate the excrement of the good life from the metropolitan circuits. The film documents the thorny path from a Viennese civil servant's comfortable life into the Privatopia of Greater Los Angeles. Our protagonists are five trash collectors. They live in Vienna, Genova, Amsterdam, New York and Los Angeles.

The immortal songs of Franz Schubert. What do they imply today? And where do they belong? According to well-known pianist and conductor Marino Formenti: not in the world's great concert halls. At least not only. With five musical laymen he tried to find another kind of truth in this music. Swiss documentary filmmaker Bruno Moll joined him in this unusual experiment.

After her father's death, Michi tries to repair her broken relationship with her young daughter in her parents' rural home. But the recently sober alcoholic is caught up in the shadows of her past, putting even her child in danger.

A naive girl's love for Switzerland is put to the test in this satiric comedy. Irina is a woman from Russia who all her life has always been fascinated by Switzerland and longs to live there some day, though her notion of Swiss life has more to do with Heidi and old movies set in the Alps than reality.

A documentary that analyzes the modern educational system and argues that it squelches children's capacity for imagination, creativity, and independent thought.

The unborn child of Mamlakat is telling her story. She is 17, beautiful and vivacious, and dreaming secretly of becoming an actress. She lives with her father and brother in a small village in Central Asia. One night she is seduced by an actor from a travelling troupe, who poses as a friend of Tom Cruise, and gets her pregnant. She tries to abort, but her father and brother become determined to find the seducer, setting in motion a cascade of comic adventures.

We do not doubt the existence of humans. On the other hand, we still do not know why we exist or how we came into existence. This film deals with man's eternal dream to discover his origins.

A human being has no sensory organ for time. We perceive it, and what is it which we are perceiving thereby? To what extent does our contemporary society influence the way we experience it? Why has time become a dominating factor in the mordern world?

When Hitler's infamous "Anschluss" annexed Austria to Germany in 1938, the lives of 130,000 Jewish Austrians were placed at risk. Over the next three years, some 30,000 managed to emigrate to the United States, settling mainly in New York City. In Austrian filmmaker Egon Humer's brilliant and moving documentary EMIGRATION N.Y., twelve Viennese Jews -- seven women, five men -- recount their lives as children in Austria, as emigrants, as New Yorkers. Deceptively simple in style, the film gathers striking emotional power as its subjects (who include Amos Vogel, co-founder of the New York Film Festival) offer fresh and often surprising views on their experience of exile and assimilation.